Case Study: Event Horizon Telescope achieves the first image of a black hole with Google Cloud

Google Cloud supports international effort to produce first-ever image of a black hole

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international research team, faced the monumental challenge of processing five petabytes of data collected from eight radio telescopes to produce the first-ever image of a black hole. They needed immense, flexible computing power to manage, analyze, and iterate on this enormous dataset, a task that was too slow and cumbersome on their existing infrastructure. They turned to Google for Education and Google Cloud to find a solution.

Google for Education provided a scalable Google Cloud solution using powerful virtual machine (VM) instances. These VMs accelerated the data analysis timeline from weeks down to days, enabling the global team to collaborate effectively and iterate through nine versions of their data. This infrastructure powered by Google for Education was critical in achieving the breakthrough image of the black hole and paves the way for future astronomical discoveries using hybrid high-performance computing in the cloud.

Event Horizon Telescope

Chi-Kwan Chan

Leader of the EHT Software and Data Compatibility Working Group